Willis Deploys Steelhead

Willis Group has deployed over 100 Steelhead® appliances from Riverbed Technologies around the world. The Riverbed® deployment has enabled Willis to consolidate its IT infrastructure, with anticipated savings of $30 million over five years, while improving access to information for its global workforce.

Willis is a leading global insurance broker, delivering professional insurance, reinsurance, risk management, financial and human resource consulting, and actuarial services to institutions around the world. Willis has more than 300 offices in 100 countries, with a global team of approximately 16,000 employees serving clients in 190 countries. Willis had grown organically and through acquisitions, which resulted in a distributed IT network running many applications, often with significant overlap. Some of these applications, such as Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange, were housed in the company's two main data centers as well as a number of international locations. Other applications, such as a web-based human resources application, were centralized and accessed globally from one data center.

This complex environment created a few challenges for Willis. First, employees around the world had difficulty accessing the centralized applications, particularly from locations with limited IT infrastructure. In addition, the distributed IT environment was expensive to maintain. "Each major office or region had its own mail server," said Eoghan Doyle, director of infrastructure and Operations. "We wanted to consolidate that to reduce both the overhead and support costs." Willis also had two primary data centers -- one in Nashville in the US and one in Ipswich in the UK. Each data center performed many of the same functions, so there were duplicate environments for many applications. Finally, many locations had bandwidth constraints.
These challenges led Willis to develop a new IT strategy to improve data sharing between global teams and consolidate applications to global or national IT hubs. Doyle and his team evaluated WDS solutions from several vendors, including Expand and Cisco. "We looked at technical capabilities, viability of the company, and the overall costs of the solution," said Doyle. Riverbed was chosen over the other vendors, particularly Cisco, because of the breadth of functionality. "The Cisco solution met one of six criteria, but Riverbed gave us five of the six we wanted, and the breadth of capability was the key differentiator," he adds.

After the successful trial, Doyle and his team began installing appliances around the world. To date, Willis has deployed more than 100 Steelhead appliances and two Interceptors® -- which enables large numbers of Steelhead appliances to work in parallel, optimizing up to one million connections, and allows for real-time addition or removal of appliances within a group.
The implementation went smoothly, without requiring significant changes to Willis's existing network. "We didn't have to dramatically change or reinvest in anything, like Cisco equipment or any other equipment," said Doyle. "Essentially, the appliances worked out of the box."

The performance improvements have been dramatic, with LAN-like application performance over the WAN, peak data reduction of 82 percent, and a capacity increase of 4.2x. The most significant benefit of the Riverbed solution has been Willis's ability to consolidate its technology infrastructure, while allowing remote workers to collaborate seamlessly. Given the high costs of operating and maintaining both data centers in Nashville and Ipswich, Willis had previously explored consolidating the two, but was unable to do so because of high latency across the global network. Steelhead appliances removed this roadblock and allowed Willis to consolidate most services to the Nashville data center. This consolidation was achieved while maintaining business application performance across international networks.

The Riverbed appliances have also become a key element of Willis's strategy for smaller international offices, allowing Willis to consolidate branch infrastructure with no performance hit to the end users. In a number of international offices where latency is high, Willis was able to remove all e-mail servers, local file servers, and Citrix-based applications. In many of these offices, a small print server is the only server remaining in the office. "An increasing amount of our international offices no longer need local IT professionals or significant local infrastructure," said Doyle.

This consolidation of infrastructure has helped Willis achieve a significant ROI on the investment, with anticipated savings of $30 million over five years. These savings are driven by the physical consolidation of locations (including building, equipment, and personnel costs), but also the lower ongoing maintenance costs.